Interview

Charlie Lovett discusses his debut novel, The Bookman's Tale, and its roots in Shakespeare and the sometimes exclusive world of antiquarian booksellers.

Are Ridgefield University and its incredible library based upon a real institution?
Ridgefield is an amalgam of several North Carolina institutions—Wake Forest University, where my father taught English for forty years and where I spent many happy hours in the library as a child; Davidson College, where I received my B.A. in 1984; and Duke University, which several of my family members attended. The Devereaux Collection is fictional, but there are certainly many American institutions that have fine collections of rare books. Among those that I have visited most frequently and which helped inspire both the Devereaux Collection and the Devereux Room are Princeton University, Harvard University, New York University, Emory University, and the New York Public Library.

You are an avid book collector and former antiquarian bookseller. Can you discuss how you became interested in both and pursued them?
My father is a book collector, and in the 1970s he began collecting editions of Robinson Crusoe. This turns out to be a great book to collect, since it has been in print constantly for nearly three hundred years. As a teenager, I would often look for copies in secondhand bookshops. In college I began to collect for myself, ...